Page 98 of The Heiress's Daughter
“Do you?” he muttered.
His bitterness, she decided, was all self-loathing, and not directed at her but at his eleven-year-old self. She let him brood in silence for a few minutes, then said, “Did you win?”
He wrenched himself around to face her and said incredulously, “What has that to do with anything? Yes, we won, but my mother—” His voice broke and he looked away again, his jaw clamped tight. A small nerve in his jaw twitched.
She put her hand on his arm and said quietly, “I think if I were dying, and the choice was having my young son at my deathbed—especially after it had happened several times—or of having him win an important cricket match, I would choose the cricket. Choosing joy for my son, knowing grief was to come.”
He shook his head, rejecting her sympathy. “You don’t understand.”
She didn’t contradict him. Nobody could understand another’s grief—it was unique to every person, no matter what the situation. All she could do was listen. And empathize.
“Was your mother’s a long illness?” she asked.
He stared out over the cricket field. “Years. I’d been called home half a dozen times in the past couple of years, but Mama had rallied each time. And I was sent back to school again.”
“But this time she didn’t.”
“No.”
“And you’ve blamed yourself ever since.”
He wrenched himself around to face her again. “It’s my greatest shame! Don’t you see? If I’d abandoned the cricket she might have…”
“Rallied? Yes, she might have, but then again she might not have. You can’t possibly know it. And there’s no point in torturing yourself about it.”
She waited a moment, then added softly, “Don’t you think she’d prefer to think of you happy and triumphant on the cricket ground instead of waiting silent and grieving in a sickroom? I know I would.”
He didn’t respond, but it seemed to her that some of the tension had been released from his body. In silence they watched the bowler deliver the next ball. The batsman clipped it and it flew behind him.
“I loved her,” he said heavily. “I thought my father did, too. I was sure of it. But…”
“You’re thinking of how he became a notorious rake after she died?”
He nodded.
“What if he couldn’t bear to lose her and threw himself into debauchery as a way of trying to forget?” she suggested.
He stared at her as if taken aback. “I suppose it’s possible,” he said slowly.
“What he did after your mother’s death does not necessarily reflect on the man he was while she was alive.”
“Maybe not.” He heaved a sigh. “How did you get to be so wise? Was that what happened with your parents?”
She gave a wry half smile. “No, Papa never cared forMama at all—it was all about her fortune for him. And after they’d married and he learned it was still mostly tied up in a trust, he treated her abominably. It made no difference to Mama, though—she loved him until the day she died.”
“How old were you when that happened?”
“Eight.”
“And you were with her when she died?”
“I sat beside her bedside the entire time she was dying—it took days. She barely even seemed to notice me. All she wanted, all she spoke of in those last days, was my father. He never came, of course.”
He took her hand in his and squeezed it gently.
She sighed. “Death so often leaves the living with unresolvable guilt.”
“Your father?”
